


flip the view and open wide

by Mici (noharlembeat)



Category: Raven Cycle - Maggie Stiefvater
Genre: Fluff and Angst, M/M, Spoilers for TRK, carnivals
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-18
Updated: 2016-07-18
Packaged: 2018-07-24 17:08:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,535
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7516328
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/noharlembeat/pseuds/Mici
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There's an annual carnival at St. Agnes. Every year, the Lynch family sponsors the funhouse, which means that it's not your typical sort of house of mirrors.</p>
            </blockquote>





	flip the view and open wide

**Author's Note:**

> This is the Pynch fic I set out to write.
> 
> As a note: I have never attended any event at a church. However, I know the churches around here throw pretty fun looking carnivals, so that's what this is based off. Please accept any weirdness as Henrietta-ness and not the writer doesn't know what she's doing.
> 
> (The writer doesn't know what she's doing)

Most holidays meant sleeping in.

Beyond the fact Aglionby had the day off, Boyd’s and the factory were closed, and it meant a rare morning where sleep was possibly past seven am. It was helped by the fact that all of Adam’s extracurriculars – that is to say, college applications, homework, and the hunt for Glendower – were all finished.

Which is why when at six-fifteen Adam is roused from sleep by the loud _crash-bang_ of something, his mood is less than stellar. Sleep is still a precious commodity, even without Cabeswater demanding his attention like a petulant child and Ronan’s impossible hours. He tries to go back to sleep but in five minutes there are more noises – crashes and bangs and men talking, and something about coffee, and sleep is all but a distant and sweet memory.

He looks out the window, and he’s pretty sure he’s hallucinating. St. Agnes is a tiny church – it shares it’s priest with two other parishes, for fuck’s sake – but there, in the parking lot, is the skeleton of a Ferris Wheel, colored in garish and quickly tarnishing paint, the bare sad bones of a fun house, a series of tents.

Adam dismisses the hallucination theory, then. His hallucinations have never been so benign, after all. He reaches for his jeans and a shirt, grabs the first thing lying on the floor, and fights it onto his body before he makes his way downstairs.

The parish priest looks Adam over. “Mr. Parrish,” he says in that deep, booming voice that sometimes features in Adam’s more uncomfortable dreams (and he’s pretty sure features in the same uncomfortable scenarios in Ronan’s). “Good morning,” he adds, and hands Adam a Styrofoam cup of bitter and acidic coffee. “Did we wake you?”

“No sir,” Adam lies, and drinks the thick brew. He doesn’t know how the coffee the church lady makes always turns out so sour, but he doesn’t care. “You know me. Up with the sun.”

“Indeed,” the priest replies. “Mr. Lynch promised he’d be here by six-thirty.”

There is a heavy, knowing silence between them. Adam is suddenly glad that he is not Catholic, because he suspects that somewhere in that silence is some magic only the ordained possess, that causes spontaneous confession. He also suspects that Ronan’s dream soundproofing thing – a small box that “catches all the noise” as he puts it, doesn’t really always work. Or maybe it’s Ronan’s Catholic guilt, and it just doesn’t work on the ears of the priest, and possibly the church lady. Every time he sees them they look at him with a glance that they, too, are intimately familiar with the noises Ronan makes when Adam’s dick is lined up just against his and Adam’s mouth is on his collarbone, making thickly purple and blue marks.

“Well. Ronan has trouble with, you know. Seeing this side of dawn.”

“Are you lying?” Ronan snaps, coming up from behind them. Opal has one tiny hand in his, and she’s wearing the special boots that Ronan dreamed up that serve both as a disguise and as a pair of shoes she can actually manage to walk in, and a beanie that covers her not-quite-so-human ears (discovered only once they managed to take that ratty skullcap off her head. Adam had frowned, and Ronan had raised his eyebrows, and Opal had hissed and smashed it back on her head). “Don’t lie to him, Parrish, Jesus Mary.”

“Mr. Lynch,” the priest says with a smile, and then he looks down at Opal. “Miss Lynch,” he says, pleased, and she just hides behind Ronan’s legs. “Not today, then?”

“I hate mornings,” she pronounces, carefully, looking up at the priest, then Ronan, and then reaching for Adam’s hand too. “Adam,” she says, and she releases Ronan, who looks fiercely proud of her for a moment. “Pick me up?”

“Please,” Adam says, because manners are important. Ronan makes a noise, but the priest is right there so he doesn’t clarify what that noise means.

Opal considers her options. “Please,” she says, finally, and Adam lifts her up into his arms. “Kerah says it’s the carnival.”

“Oh,” Adam says, and turns to look at Ronan, who is taking a cup of coffee from the priest’s never-ending supply. “The carnival.”

“Annual church carnival,” Ronan clarifies. “It’s sh-“ he stops himself, eyes his priest, and redirects, “ _simple_ , but whatever. Every year. Like clockwork. Veterans day.”

“We didn’t do this last year,” Adam points out as Opal’s head leans heavily on his shoulder. He can feel her warm breath. She smells a little like Cabeswater and a lot like hay, which is because she insists on sleeping in it.

Ronan shakes his head. “Last year you were knee deep in Gansey and Glendower. Before that, you know-“

Before that, Adam realizes, he had probably been lying beaten in a pile of bones and skin, exhausted, bruised, unwilling to show up to whatever his new friends had been doing. Before that, he remembers, Ronan had been so deep in his grief that he was barely coming to church on Sundays, and he avoided it every other day of the week. “I know,” he finally says. Opal is snoozing, gently, her tiny fingers interlocked behind Adam’s neck. “So. A carnival.”

“The Lynches always sponsor the funhouse,” the priest says. “Ronan brought the supplies. It’s the best part.”

Adam looks sideways at Ronan, who is grimly staring at the rusty blue truck that has a bundle of wooden slats in the flatbed, and unknown props and supplies under the tarp. “Declan and Matthew are bringing the rest. They stayed over, but Matthew hates mornings more the Opal does.”

It’s hard to imagine Ronan’s sunshine and sugar brother hating anything at all, but then he remembers those sleepy breakfasts at Aglionby, with Ronan grunting and smashing food around his plate, and Matthew eating with the mechanical motions of a boy who is less boy and more zombie. That was back when Adam would arrive early enough to do his homework at school, and when Ronan’s only time spent with Matthew was in the morning, when Declan was at debate team.

Adam realizes, then, that between Ronan and the priest, he’s going to be asked to help set up. This is as elegant a con job as Ronan has ever pulled. He sighs. “I’ll go put Opal upstairs,” he says, “and I’ll be back down in a few minutes.”

~~~~~

Adam spends the morning building things with Ronan. It’s cool enough that they don’t get drenched in sweat, and halfway through the morning Declan and Matthew join them with more props – strange mirrors and odd spinning tunnels. Doubtless it was a part of Niall’s dreams, things kept back in storage units, just magical enough to be a wild funhouse, and just real enough to be believable.

Declan is about to set up the mirrors when he frowns down at the flatbed of the truth he brought – sensible, not rusting, clearly rented – and looks at Matthew. “Did you pack all the mirrors? A bunch are missing.”

“Oh, I put them up already, is that okay?” he asks, and Declan considers that; Declan is more careful with Matthew than Ronan is with Opal. At first Adam thought it was because Declan thought that Matthew was slow, but now he wonders if it’s because Declan thinks of Matthew as a part of Ronan that didn’t reject him during the long fight between the Lynch brothers. Something precious and irreplaceable. Someone who will love him no matter what.

It sits bitterly in his gut.

He turns away before it’s resolved, uncomfortable.

Ronan catches Adam just after that, while people are breaking for lunch, his hand on Adam’s hip as he spins him into an alcove. They’ve spent the last two months doing this – finding corners and slotting themselves into them where they can’t be seen, and Ronan kisses Adam with a sweetness that speaks nothing of his desperation. That, Adam feels in his firm grip on Adam’s hip, in the way he tugs Adam over him. There is something wild and furious in Ronan that is tamed at Adam’s touch, and it thrills him every time. “Jesus,” Adam whispers.

“Careful,” Ronan warns, but the fire in his eyes is delight and not caution. “This is a _church_.”

“You’ve said more blasphemous things above it,” Adam counters, smirking.

Ronan kisses that smirk. “Doesn’t count,” he argues, casually, and presses his face against Adam’s temple, presses his face against Adam’s skin. It’s a sweet and generous movement; it’s something that six months ago, Adam would have said was beyond Ronan’s capacity to produce. He doesn’t know where Ronan’s sweetness comes from. He’s still snappish and growling, surly towards the world, snarling his way through classes that Gansey and Adam won’t let him quit and social interactions he’s not 100% a consenting, compliant member of. But with Adam he reserves these moments, precious and quiet and incredibly sweet. Ronan’s smile with the war excised.

“Are you going to kiss me again?” Adam asks. 

Ronan leans in, dips his head a little, and presses his mouth against Adam’s; Adam’s forearms are against the wall, and he feels like they’re in their own world, bracketed together.

When they come apart Adam has to blink to not be dazzled by the light of day, as if Ronan shielded him from it, made his eyes forget the sun. It’s momentarily confusing, but then they’re going back to their respective chores in this carnival process, and as lunch rolls around everything is almost done. It looks like the kind of place that Adam would have wanted to go as a child, a respite from the Henrietta dust.

When night comes, it’s even more that place.

Ronan and Opal had headed home for the afternoon, promising to come back as the sun set, and Adam had gotten a little homework done but mostly he stared out at the men who set up the rides, and smelled the food stalls as they prepped. The priest had offered a dozen of tokens for rides and food which Adam only took as payment for helping earlier in the day, and Adam genuinely found himself looking forward to it.

As night settled over them and the church grounds lit up with buzzing halogens and the smell of kettle corn, the carnival feels just as otherworldly as Cabeswater did. People start showing up with their kids and there’s laughing and noise and music, of course - congregation members have a tent that they’re performing in - and it doesn’t feel like Henrietta. Or maybe, Adam thinks as he strolls through to the other side of the parking lot, it feels the way that Henrietta should feel. Condensed into something good. It feels the way that Gansey sees it.

Opal runs to him first, reaching for his hand, her eyes huge as she takes everything in. “Did you dream?” she asks Adam, looking up at him in wonder, as if this is a standard question. 

“Not this afternoon,” he tells her, as if this is a standard answer. She raises her arms and he doesn’t fuss about _please_ this time, picks her up.

“Don’t harass him, shit, go find your fucking friends,” Ronan snaps as he follows her. “Doesn’t he give you enough attention?”

Opal is not a delicate thing. She can be easily frightened, it’s true, but she’s from Ronan and she makes a noise, a bird-noise that draws attention in protest. Adam is grateful he can only hear out of one ear for a moment, and Ronan grabs her from him, sets her down. She looks shocked and a bit disgruntled, and tells him, fluidly, in Latin, to do several physically improbable things with a garbage can.

Adam startles at that as soon as his brain catches up enough to hear Ronan hiss back that she needs to keep a lid on her bad language.

(Actually, he says that she needs to keep the lid into the bad language, Adam thinks, because his declensions are always a little messy.) 

Adam gives Ronan a _look_ , but Ronan is already urging her off into the darkness. “Does she even have friends,” Adam asks as she tumbles off, tugging her hat tightly over her ears.

Ronan shrugs. “Aren’t you always saying she needs to expand her horizons or whatever?”

“You can’t just let her go off by herself,” he argues, but Ronan is moving him in the opposite direction. “Lynch-!”

“We’re at a church carnival, Parrish, at my church, and everyone knows who she is. No one is going to fuck with her. Plus, I know the Maggot and Gansey are showing up too, at some point. She’ll be fine,” Ronan replies, and then-

-and then they’re holding hands.

They’re holding hands in _public_.

Adam feels a quiver of terror shoot up through his spine, he feels it arch through him. He wants this. He wants this normal action, he wants it more than Ronan can possibly understand. His entire life he’s been concentrated desire and aching want, and his whole life he’s been able to focus it into a set of goals. But what he has with Ronan is different. What he has with Ronan isn’t quantifiable. He doesn’t know what he wants out of it until he gets a taste of it, and then he wants it all. 

But because Adam is Adam, he doesn’t say anything. He holds a raven boy’s hand in public and they walk through the dim lights of the carnival together.

~~~~

They’re in the funhouse after cotton candy and kettle corn and a blistering squabble over why Ronan was not going to win Adam a stuffed animal and why Adam was not going to buy Ronan a hot dog. Adam spots Declan with Ashley near the front; they’re laughing and unguarded for a moment, and Adam sees the pieces of Declan that drive Ronan crazy - the lie of his smile and the twist of his hands against hers, the way that he’s energy incarnate when he’s with his friends, the way that he doesn’t show the cracks that Adam knows are there. It’s disconcerting and not for the first time, Adam is glad that Ronan shaves his head. 

“You coming?” Ronan asks, and turns into the maze. For a funhouse that can’t be bigger than Adam’s parent’s doublewide, it’s shockingly spacious inside, the mirrors and the spinning stripes making it seem impossibly vast. Adam is turning to see Ronan go inside first, and he follows. 

It only takes a moment to lose him. “Wait-” he starts, frustrated. It’s not that big, there can’t be that many ways in, or out, or around. “Ronan!” he says, startled enough to use Ronan’s first name. 

“Further in!” Ronan yells out, and Adam catches a glimpse of him in the darkness. The mirrors are warping and strange, pushing out Adam’s features. In one he’s taller than tall, stretching up and against the ceiling, in another he’s fat and short and looks like an extra in a 1980s fantasy movie. In a third he’s a shifting assortment of colors, his skin taking on lavender and rose tones, and then cerulean and nauseous green. In another his eyes are wide and impossibly blue, Lynch blue. Looking too long into the mirrors and the reflections makes Adam sick in a way he can’t pinpoint. It’s not like they’re mirror images, but more like they’re the boy and Adam is really the one who looks strange.

There’s a path that Ronan must have taken, surrounded by mirrors, and Adam only knows because it’s the only direction that Adam can’t see himself in one of Niall’s uncomfortable mirrors. He sees Ronan turn a corner, but when he walks towards him he feels a shiver up his spine, a whisper of the last shadow of Cabeswater that splintered a thorn of magic into his soul.

“Ronan?” he says, confused, and someone bumps into him. “Sorry,” Adam says suddenly, and looks around as he turns the corner and is let out into the blessedly cool night. 

But he doesn’t see Ronan. 

It’s hard to imagine that Ronan just left him. To begin with, Ronan, for all his faults and impossibilities, possesses a keen awareness of Adam’s distress and a protective streak that even the other boys at Aglionby have taken notice of. But more than that, Adam doesn’t want ot believe that Ronan would ever leave him.

(That’s a question he’ll examine, later, clinically, when he’s asleep alone in his own bed and desperately wants to drive his shitty car the thirty minutes to the Barns.)

He sees Matthew, then, with an unwieldy instrument case. He didn’t think that Matthew played any instrument well enough to perform, and he certainly didn’t expect to see him with one here, but he heads over. “Have you seen your brother?”

Matthew looks surprised to see Adam, his eyes big. “Parrish?” he asks, and Adam raises both his eyebrows. Matthew looks around as if he’s making sure that Adam is speaking to him. “Oh, they’re probably in the tent. I didn’t think-” he begins, but shrugs. Matthew is good at accepting things as they come to him, and better at letting confusion slide to the wayside. “Um, this way,” he says.

Adam follows, and when he gets in the tent he stares up at the rickety, makeshift stage. There’s Declan and Declan and Declan, but no, that’s wrong - there’s _Niall_ and _Niall_ and _Niall_ , three men made from the same mold, curly hair a riot of darkness and blue eyes snapping with frantic energy as they set up instruments. Adam hears the strange lilting inflections of Niall’s accent as he orders his sons around, as Matthew joins them and Niall rubs his curls, and Adam sits, heavily, rubbing his eyes and trying to work his mouth.

That splinter of Cabeswater, the last remaining part of magic and leyline and power feels like its working it’s way through Adam’s heart. 

Because one of those men, smiling and pushing his brother and setting up his flute, that’s _Ronan_.

Adam had thought that he was the sole person who knew all the shapes that Ronan’s smile could take; that he was privileged in that way, to the secrets of Ronan’s laugh and Ronan’s tender pleasure. But now he’s looking up at a Ronan who isn’t Ronan, at a Ronan whose smile Adam doesn’t recognize.

It should make him happy, to see his boyfriend like that, but it doesn’t.

People are sitting down now, and Niall is introducing music, but Adam can’t take his gaze away from Ronan, who is making some joke to Declan and Declan is _laughing_ and Matthew is giggling and Declan says something back that makes Ronan smile that unfamiliar, not-Ronan smile, and the three of them are a perfect synchronized unit, siblings that only exists in movies and the dreams that Adam had about family back before he understood that there was nothing that would fix the way his father yelled at him. Declan is still laughing as he tunes the last of his violin and Ronan blows a sour note out of his flute, and Niall sits back and they play.

The music itself is like one of Ronan’s most recent dream things, the things he leaves in Adam’s bed before he wakes up in the morning, the things that are gifts and not nightmares. It feels like light that Ronan loves, twirling up and through the tent. 

It feels like a piece of his relationship with Ronan on display for the entire world to see. More than holding hands, it feels like an intimacy lain bare. Adam sits, transfixed. He can only hear in one ear but the music fills his head. 

He sits through their entire set, song after song unfolding across the audience, and Adam gets more and more distressed as he sits there. This is magic, he knows it. This is a night stolen from some world where Niall didn’t die, where Ronan’s grief didn’t consume him, where his family wasn’t fractured. The more he looks at them up on the stage, the four of them in concert, the more he thinks he is missing an entire portion of Ronan.

This is family, and this is what Ronan lost, and this is why Ronan can never be normal again. Whatever Adam is, he’s a stopgap, not a cure. 

When they finish, Adam catches his breath like he’s forgotten how to breathe. The pain in his lungs is unbearable for a moment, as if every cell in his body is now too accustomed to anaerobic function to bear the pain of oxygen. He gets up and turns just in time to see Matthew pointing, and Ronan coming down the steps.

He wants to run.

But Ronan, even this smiling, curly haired version of him, even this foreigner in his boyfriend’s skin can pin him to place with the war in his eyes. That’s familiar. “What are you doing here?” he asks, because Ronan changed but he didn’t change so much as to become completely new. Ronan doesn’t waste time with hellos in the real world. Inside this magical bubble, he does the same.

“I-” Adam starts, but he can’t finish. Niall is slipping next to Ronan, arm around his shoulder. He has age on his face in a way that’s charming and not a single white hair in his thick, glossy curls. “Sorry-,” he tries, this time.

“Who’s your friend,” Niall asks Ronan, and extends a hand, a hello. He’s made of charm and effervescent energy, and he reminds Adam painfully of Declan, when Declan wants to be impressive. Only Niall does it in such a natural way that it doesn’t feel like trying.

Ronan snorts, unimpressed, uncharmed, even as Adam shakes Niall’s hand and feels a certain turbulence over it. This is Ronan’s dead father. This is the center of Ronan’s world. This is the one who built his sons a funeral pyre, poured the gasoline over it, and waited for someone else to light the match to burn them alive. This is whose legacy forced Adam to find the most twisted part of his monstrous mind to save his friends.

“This is Adam Parrish,” Ronan says, his chin lifting. “We’re not friends,” he adds. There is no recognition in Ronan’s voice, and no familiarity in the tilt of his head. 

“We go to the same school,” Adam clarifies. 

Niall looks pleased. “Did you like the music?” he asks, and doesn’t let Adam answer. “Of course he liked it, these boys are born and bred musicians. Which one was your favorite?” he continues, and despite what Adam knows he wants Niall to like him. It’s magnetic, in that way, Niall’s charm. It wants him to want you.

“The last one, sir,” Adam replies, and Ronan looks at Adam, suddenly, a look that isn’t sure what’s happening. 

He tilts his head back up to Niall. “Told you,” he tells his father, satisfied, and pushes at him, and Niall pushes back. 

“You should make friends with this one, you have the same taste in soppy music,” Niall counters, and Ronan makes a noise but Niall is already pushing him back. “Go see to your instrument, I’ll be up there in a minute.”

Ronan goes, and Adam watches him. He goes and Declan and Matthew are chatting, and then the three of them are talking. Declan makes fun of Ronan, he can tell, and Ronan makes a face but then he’s laughing too.

“You look at him like he’s a feast and you’re a starving man,” Niall says, without pretense. 

Adam looks back at Ronan’s father, suddenly, alarmed that he’s still there. “I’m sorry?” he says, his accent slipping out of his control. His vowels elongate, drop, Henrietta pounds its way back into his voice. He says it but he knows what Niall is talking about.

Niall knows that, too. “Boy, I know lovesick.”

“I’m not here to-” Adam starts, but he bites back finishing the reply, because in all honesty he doesn’t know how. He’s not here to what? The truth is he’s not sure what he’s here for. He doesn’t know how he got here. All he knows is that he has never seen Ronan like this and something about it terrifies him. It invalidates the morning and the kisses behind the church and the hand-holding through the fair. It invalidates the bickering and the smiles and the soft presses of Ronan’s mouth against Adam’s skin when Ronan thinks that Adam is sleeping, and he doesn’t know why. “I don’t know why I’m here.”

Ronan whistles, sharply, and Niall gives him the finger. Ronan gives him the finger back. Declan rolls his eyes. “You’re here to see him.”

There are a million things that Adam wants to say. _I love him_ is primary, and breathtaking, and impossible. He’s been working those words over like a scab, picking at them over and over until they bleed. _He’s the only thing I’ve wanted more than leaving Henrietta_ is another one, and that one hurts to think about. _I’m used to him looking back at me with the same look_ is the easiest, but the one that says the most. He can’t say any of those things. They’re too personal. They’re too much a piece of who Adam is.

But Niall is looking at him and the silence is going on too long, so Adam finally settles on, “Well, that isn’t a lie.”

Niall raises his eyebrows, and shakes his head. “Good to meet you, Adam Parrish,” he says, and starts heading back to his family, to a future where he doesn’t have his face bashed in, to a world where his death doesn’t spark the end of the boy who is sitting on the edge of the stage with his brothers and who looks, for all intents and purposes, happy.

Adam starts to wander back to the funhouse, then. 

There aren’t a lot of things that Adam can’t piece together if he tries, not when it comes to the waking world. He knows that dreams are finicky and fickle things, but the items that come out of them are shockingly consistent. “Ronan,” he says, crying his name out in the dark. It’s getting late. There aren’t that many people in here, now, wandering the inside of Niall’s dream. “Ronan,” he repeats, and he thinks, no, he won’t cry. 

“Ronan,” he says, finally, and he hears his own name repeated back to him in Ronan’s deep baritone.

He spots Ronan at the other end of the hall, his head shaved, the shape of him familiar and comfortable. Ronan Lynch how Adam knows him.

He comes back out through the mirror, and Ronan looks surprised to see him, as if he didn’t see him in the dark. “Where the fuck were you?” Ronan asks, reaching, but then not touching him. Adam wonders if the meeting with Niall is stamped on his face, if Ronan will see what Adam did, who Adam spoke to, if it’s etched on him with some secret ink that only a Lynch can see.

But no. He buries his hands in his pocket. “I got lost in here,” Adam says.

“Just because it’s bigger than your apartment doesn’t mean that shit is going to fly,” Ronan replies, but the snarl isn’t there, the rage is contained. He’s not angry, and Adam thinks that’s enough. “Maggot and Gansey brought Cheng. They want to get food, you in?” Adam nods in reply, puts his hands in his own pockets, and follows Ronan out.

~~~~

It’s late, and Adam can’t sleep. 

He went back to the Barns with Ronan, because he had pointed out that _there’s no way you’re going to sleep tonight, that thing goes until midnight and then they start taking shit down_ , and he didn’t want to tell Ronan that there wasn’t any way he was going to sleep anyway.

It’s three in the morning when he slips out of Ronan’s bed and goes to the kitchen to stare at the clock and wonder what the hell he should do. The inside of his stomach is sour. He needs to tell Ronan about the mirror, about what he saw, but at the same time, he thinks of what will happen if he does. He thinks about the Ronan he saw, about the boy who had a father and what he looked like. About how he looked at Adam. About the smiles Adam’s never seen and the laugh Adam’s never heard, out in public.

When Ronan’s arms slip around him, he isn’t surprised. When Ronan’s face is against his bare shoulder, he isn’t surprised, either. He turns his head just a little. “You should sleep,” he tries.

“Pot, kettle,” Ronan replies. “You need it just as badly.”

Adam rubs a hand through his hair. He can feel the exhaustion tugging at him. It’s the first time he’s felt this badly since before Glendower, before Ronan. It’s the first time he’s realized that his misery was just as emotional as it was physical. “Did you-” he starts, but doesn’t finish.

“You went into the mirror,” Ronan finishes for him. “What did you see?”

Adam turns, then, in Ronan’s arms, and stares at him, at this unfathomable boy. “What did you see?” he asks Ronan in return, unsure. 

“My dad made that mirror, he dreamed it,” Ronan replies. “Declan told me, when you went missing. That my dad made it, Declan packed it, and Matthew put it out on accident, and Declan didn’t notice. Whatever it was, Adam,” he insists, and Adam is jolted when Ronan uses his real name, like he always is, the heat of it slamming through him, “it wasn’t real.”

Adam feels the wail push out of him, but it doesn’t come out that way. It comes out high and whispery, more air than noise. “Like your tree,” Adam says, “it shows us things that aren’t real?” 

“Declan said it showed him what could have been if we hadn’t fought. I think it’s not like the tree. It’s not a bad future. It’s just possibility,” Ronan replies. “He said you would come back, so I didn’t worry.”

 _He said you would come back, so I didn’t worry_ Ronan says, as if it’s that simple. As if he and Declan are friends, as if this was just a small, tiny thing. As if they were still the boys on that stage. 

Adam just stands there, silent as a stone. “Fuck,” he finally says, and drops his head against Ronan’s shoulder. “Ronan-”

“No,” Ronan replies. “Don’t tell me.”

Adam looks up, surprised. “But-”

“Don’t fucking tell me,” Ronan repeats. “I don’t want to know. I don’t care. I don’t give a shit about what you saw in some mirror, I don’t give a shit about what it is that’s making you like this, except that it’s making you like this. So don’t fucking tell me, all right?” He presses his fingers against Adam’s temples, and runs his thumbs against his cheekbones.

“Sometimes I feel like I don’t know you at all,” Adam says.

Ronan snorts. “Jesus Christ,” he replies. “You’re fucking impossible. Every day I catch a new angle of you and it’s so fucking irritating. So fuck off, all right?”

“You need to widen your vocabulary,” Adam chokes out, but he’s pressing closer, until he’s against Ronan, his head on Ronan’s shoulder, his arms around Ronan’s waist. It feels safe there, and Ronan turns his head to smile against Adam’s forehead, and he thinks, that’s it.

The reason he’s never seen that smile is that Ronan has always pressed it against his skin like a secret.

The words still sit like a scab against the inside of his brain, swirl in acidic layers around his mouth, but it doesn’t matter. He tips his head and reaches for Ronan’s hand. “You know everything about me,” he tells him. “I’m not holding anything back.”

Ronan doesn’t say a word before he follows him to bed. They’re there, lying next to each other, when Ronan finally replies. “I’m glad you were there with me. Today. It was my dad’s favorite thing. He used to make us perform and shit, and he was so fucking proud. It didn’t matter that it was a church carnival. It was his favorite event. It was the only time he was guaranteed to be home.”

Adam thinks about it for a moment, and thinks about the things he could say, but what he knows is that whatever it is, it won’t cost him as much as the words that Ronan just said cost him. He dishes out the memories as if by giving them to someone else, they’ll dissolve, and he’ll never see them again. Memories are family, and family is private.

Adam holds that close. “You can tell me anything,” he whispers, and holds Ronan’s hand to his, tightly. It’s an easy way to fall asleep, tethered to a dreaming thing, tied to the waking world. The space between them is warm, and willing, and Adam thinks he’s the only one who knows about it.

**Author's Note:**

> As ever: eggsac on tumblr, if you want to find me.


End file.
